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lucabrasi999 writes "The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a story today on the 2004 inductees to the Robot Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame is affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University. The highlight of the ceremony was apparently a handshake between Anthony Daniels (C-3PO) and ASIMO (Honda). Well, at least Robby the Robot finally made it in. Now I can sleep easy at night."

So, Anonymous farking Coward, you admit that Bush is a robot spy! Tell us that he's from the future, and that he takes the same batteries as Schwarzenegger. We'll get them both by grounding the ionosphere!

Yes, they obviously transplanted an unnatural spine into the president who flipflopped on steel tarrifs, pre/post 9/11 terrorism priorities, catching Osama, education, nationbuilding, uniting/dividing, the environment, WMD in Iraq, and everything else that faced down his cowboy words and fratboy convictions. That's why the bulge is so small, and he doesn't have the guts to admit that he can't face any questions unless Cheney's "got his back". In fact, maybe that lump is Cheney. Maybe Bush has flipflopped fr

What an appalling sense of science fiction history these people have. They have "SIMO...ASTRO BOY...C-3PO...Robby, the Robot...Shakey" but the ground-breaking robot from Metropolis, Maria, isn't there. This sexy robot was years ahead of its time and it wasn't until Star Wars that the boxy water heaters with flexible duct arms finally gave way back to this original design.

The idea that they would have C3P0 without first inducting Maria, who C3P0 is derivative of, shows a poor acknowledgment of the foundation laid for the future by Fritz Lang.

While you're right on the mark about Maria, you're missing the meaning of the word "fame," as in "Robot Hall of Fame."
Lang was visionary, (as was Wilcox with Forbidden Planet) but Maria was and is not famous.

Still, she should have at least got an honorary mention for the obvious impact she made on Lucas.

It is a good point, but I think that should be more to a "Hall of Fame" than just voting in the most recent candidates. If mere fame were enough, then a Hall of Fame would be redundant since only the most obviously famous would be there...but perhaps that is the point, to pander to people.

the companies that use them as window dressing "research" for PR purposes. The "robots from science" category might be legit.
A glaring omission
is a category like "robots from industry". Welders,
spray painters and lab technicians who prepare DNA
samples for sequencing engines may lament their lost jobs but few people have any idea how much their Ford or Chevy would cost or how many more decades it
would have taken to crack the human genome without those least spectacular and dumbest of automatons.
Except that I assume the hall of fame sponsors have hopes of keeping public interest in robotics from going all the way to zero, I think its kinda phony.

So true. When the average person thinks of robots they think of Robbie (not even a real robot) like bots. But most real robots bear no resemblance at all to the human form. Think of, for example, modern automotive manufacturing, or appliances such as electronic equipment. Almost completely built by robots.

Why does Carnegie Mellon continue to ignore QRIO [sony.net] and AIBO [aibo.com] for this "hall of fame"? Both robots have a place in the Guinness Book [guinnessworldrecords.com] of World Records [guinnessworldrecords.com], but CMU is consistently ignoring them for some reason.

The Hall of fame seems to completely disregard Dr Who and English sci-fi in general. No Cybermen, no K-9, no Daleks (semi-organics), no Tim from the Tomorrow People... and where's R. Daneel? If the longest ever running sci-fi television show, and the proposer of the positronic brain and the three laws of robotics can't get in the door, then the Bat computer will probably win it next year.

jesus.. i think most of you can agree that you feel its quite lame for there to be "fake" or hollywood robots to be in the hall of fame.. yea they may have been cool characters, there's no doubt in my mind about that.. but what about the people that dedicate their lives to robotics? there's much more than ASIMO out there..

Some less obvious ones:The star-trek computer (Well they added HAL)Jane from the Ender series (She's so much more than a computer afterall)The entire cast of Ghost in the Shell.And if that goes, well heck what about Agent Smith ?Does frankensteins monster count (After all it's the first sifi version of a bioware animaton) ?

Of course some specific real world robots deserve mention.Big Blue for one.This is politically charged (and I'm both non- and somewhat ant